What does a technical SEO audit actually check?
It checks whether the pages that make you money can be crawled, rendered, indexed and served fast enough to compete.
We start from the URLs tied to revenue: product, category, service and lead-generation pages. Then we work outward. A crawl shows what the site exposes, the logs show what bots actually request, and Search Console shows what Google chose to index. The gaps between those three views are where most problems live.
Rendering gets its own pass. If key content, links or canonical tags only appear after JavaScript runs, we compare the raw HTML with the rendered page and note what a crawler might miss.
How do you decide which fixes come first?
Every finding gets an impact, effort and confidence score, and the list is sorted by expected return per hour of developer time.
A missing canonical on one blog post and a broken canonical across 40,000 product URLs are both "canonical issues." They do not belong on the same line of the backlog.
| Finding (hypothetical example) | Impact | Effort | Priority |
|---|---|---|---|
| Category pages blocked by a robots.txt rule | High | Low | Fix this sprint |
| LCP above 4 seconds on product templates | High | Medium | Next sprint |
| Redirect chains of 3+ hops after an old migration | Medium | Low | Next sprint |
| Invalid Product markup on a few legacy pages | Low | Low | Batch with other template work |
| Thin tag archives crawled heavily in logs | Medium | Medium | Plan and test |
Impact is estimated from the traffic and revenue those URLs carry today or could carry. If you want to model the value of a fix yourself, our article on how to measure SEO ROI walks through the inputs.
Which Core Web Vitals thresholds do you use?
We use Google's published "good" thresholds at the 75th percentile: LCP of 2.5 seconds or less, INP of 200 milliseconds or less and CLS of 0.1 or less.
Field data from real users comes first, because lab tests on a fast laptop rarely match a mid-range phone on a weak connection. Where field data is thin, we test representative templates in the lab and say clearly that the numbers are estimates.
What happens after the audit is delivered?
We walk your developers through the tickets, answer questions while they build, and recrawl once fixes are live.
Tickets include the affected URL pattern, how to reproduce the issue, the expected result and a test that proves it is fixed. Redirect work follows the logic in our piece on when to use a 302 versus a 301. Titles and descriptions flagged in the audit can be spot-checked with the title and meta checker.
Scope depends on site size and how much rendering and log work is needed, so pricing is set per project. Request a proposal and we will reply with a scope and timeline range.
Frequently asked questions
How long does a technical SEO audit take?
Most audits take three to five weeks from access to walkthrough. Sites with millions of URLs, several subdomains or heavy client-side rendering sit at the long end, mainly because log files and rendering tests take longer to collect and compare.
What access do you need?
Read access to Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and analytics, plus a sample of raw server logs covering at least a few weeks. Staging access helps if a release or migration is in progress.
Do you fix the issues or just report them?
The core deliverable is the ranked list and the tickets. We can review pull requests, QA fixes on staging and recheck production afterward, but your developers or platform vendor make the code changes.
Is Core Web Vitals a big ranking factor?
Google uses page experience signals, but relevance and quality matter far more, and nobody outside Google knows the exact weights. We treat Core Web Vitals as a conversion and user issue first and fix the pages where slow loads cost the most money.
Can you help with a site migration?
Yes. We build the redirect map, check it before launch, crawl the new site on release day and monitor index coverage and traffic for the following weeks. Google recommends keeping permanent redirects in place for at least a year.